Monthly Archives: October 2025

articles, drumpf, i am a terrorist

If Trump and his minions said it, it’s probably a lie

If Trump and his minions said it, it’s probably a lie
By Dave Zweifel
Oct 22, 2025

It’s mystifying how so many of our top elected leaders blatantly lie and, unbelievably, get away with it.

Yes, politicians have lied repeatedly throughout our country’s history. Even George Washington, the myth notwithstanding, told a fib or two. And who will ever forget Bill Clinton’s, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”

But the practice has morphed into an art form. And with the fracturing of the “news” media, where falsehoods are repeated nonstop, there are no longer guardrails while all too many Americans gullibly swallow the lies.

They can’t be dismissed as “fibs” any more. They are out-and-out lies, and those telling them know full well what they’re doing. They have come to learn that if they tell those lies enough times, millions of people will come to accept them as the God’s truth.

Take this month’s government shutdown as the most recent example.

Democrats took advantage of the Senate’s 60-vote filibuster rule to block extending the Republican budget that next year will halt health care coverage for roughly 20 million people. With control of Congress and the White House in the hands of Donald Trump, it was their only leverage to save Medicaid coverage and ObamaCare supplements for low-income American families.

That’s when the lying started, and it was carefully coordinated. Because when the truth is that Republicans cut health care to finance tax breaks for corporations and the billionaires that run them, it’s wise to come up with a fake story.

Vice President JD Vance, House Speaker Mike Johnson and a chorus of Senate Republicans — all amplified by the “fair and balanced” Fox News network — claimed that the Democrats shut down the government “to give free health care to illegal aliens.”

Trump went so far as to post a fake AI meme in which a fake Chuck Schumer makes the fake statement, “If we give all these illegal aliens free health care, we might be able to get them on our side so they can vote for us.”

As former Philadephia Inquirer columnist, now Substack author, Dick Polman observed, “The ‘free health care for illegal aliens’ lie is the new ‘immigrants are eating our dogs and cats.'”

“For starters,” he continued, “it requires five seconds of cognitive thought to realize how brazenly stupid the lie really is. What political party, except one bent on committing political suicide, would ever propose spending billions of taxpayers’ money on giving free health care to millions of undocumented immigrants — and shutting down the government (thus imperiling many federal services and federal workers’ jobs) in a bid to advance such a scheme?

“Besides, it couldn’t happen anyway because it’s illegal — and the Democratic party alone still respects and hews to the rule of law. Undocumented people are expressly prohibited by law from signing up for federally-financed health insurance. They can’t get Medicaid. They can’t sign up for Obamacare coverage.

“They can’t sign up for Medicare. They can’t sign up for the Children’s Health Insurance Program. And not a single syllable in the Democrats’ budget plan even hints that the millions of undocumented people should be granted eligibility for any federal health care.”

But despite the facts, the lie works. Social media postings, fringe websites and internet chats bemoan the stupid Democrats who want to give “those damn illegals” health coverage.

They also agree with Vance’s claim that the reason Americans have to wait so long at emergency rooms is because they’re jammed up with immigrants getting free care. Vance knows, or at least he should, that hospital ERs are required to treat everyone who shows up. It’s a law signed in 1986 by the conservative’s old hero, Ronald Reagan.

But the lies feed the narrative that the administration is employing to build public support for its efforts to indiscriminately deport immigrants. Trump once lied that the deportations were aimed at criminals, drug dealers, rapists and sex perverts, but now it’s the guy with the Spanish accent who has been selling tacos from his truck for the past 10 years in downtown Chicago.

In order to provide cover for its unprecedented invasion of America’s largest cities by federalized military troops, Trump claims that Portland and Los Angeles are burning, Chicago is being overrun by mobs hindering ICE agents, Washington, D.C., is a war zone.

A bemused Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker parodied Trump by noting, among other absurdities, that, “People are being forced to eat hot dogs with ketchup on them.”

Some claim that Trump perfected the lie with his never-ending claim that he actually won the 2020 presidential election. But even before that the Washington Post tabulated that Trump had uttered 30,573 lies during his first term alone. He’s well on his way to bettering that record since he resumed office just 10 months ago.

One whopper was issued just the other day when Trump claimed that Joe Biden had sent undercover FBI agents — 276 to be exact — to the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to incite the insurrection that occurred that day.

Trouble is, Joe Biden wasn’t president then. Donald Trump was.

depression, frustration, getting old, moe, rants, the very big stupid

it’s STUPID!! 😒

moe went to chicago. the day after she came home (today) she had to come home from work early, because she had “the airplane crud”… whether or not this is COVID or something else hasn’t been addressed yet, but it seems to me like every other time she has flown somewhere, she has come home sick, which results in my getting sick about a week later. 😒

it’s stupid, but that’s only part of the issue. 😒

i went to fred meyer to get some medicine for her. i searched for pseudoephedrine on the shelves, and couldn’t find it, so i asked, and it turns out that it’s a “controlled substance”, which means that i had to buy it from the pharmacy, so i went to the pharmacy, waited in line, and told them what i needed. they said they had to have identification, so i got out my passport…

the passport is FEDERAL identification. it SUPERCEDES whatever identification the state gives me, and for most purchases that require identification, after an initial period of confusion — most people use their drivers’ license, so they’re not expecting someone to use a passport — is accepted as legitimate, valid identification…

but the lady behind the counter was hesitant to take my passport, and over the course of 10 minutes of futzing around, got no less than THREE other people involved in a discussion about what to do with this weirdo who wants to use FEDERAL identification, instead of STATE identification.

eventually another person — a young guy in a white coat (presumably one of the actual pharmacy technicians) — came up and told me that THEY CAN’T ACCEPT MY PASSPORT!! 😒 BECAUSE IT DOESN’T HAVE A BAR CODE!! 🤬

they don’t need my identification. they need proof that i am a resident of washington, and a way to log my purchase of controlled substances into a state-controlled database, because pseudoephadrine is one of the precursors needed to cook methamphetamine at home! 😒

the fact that my wife is sick, and needs medicine doesn’t matter. the fact that i am only buying one package of this allegedly “controlled substance” doesn’t matter. the fact that i presented legally legitimate identification doesn’t matter. they need to make sure that i’m not going to break the law BEFORE IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS because a few dumbshits made some questionable decisions… and, i can GUARANTEE you that all this gawping around and poking into my personal life, and that of my (sick) wife, won’t actually decrease the amount of “illegal” methamphetamine being manufactured in somebody’s kitchen, in the slightest degree!! 😒

all my life, i have tried very hard to be a person who doesn’t grow up to be a cranky old man, but with all of the bad things that i have seen happening over the past few decades, politically, and things like this ON TOP OF THAT, it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep myself from turning into a cranky old man… i can FEEL IT HAPPENING! and i DO NOT like it. 🤬

meta, miscellaneous, moe, nursery, pe(s)ts

the date of ďɳ

i’m trying to make the title say “the date of dn” because “dn”, upside down, is “up”… but i can’t find a unicode “d” that will stay a lower-case “d” when the rest of the title is forced upper-case… and, naturally, i don’t remember the html and/or css to make it ignore the forced capitalisation for the title, so i’m giving up. the title of the post is “THE DATE OF dn” and you can safely ignore whatever it says on the actual title line, this time. 😕

i just enabled three PHP modules that have not been enabled previously. as far as i can tell, they don’t make any difference, but having them enabled makes the annoying reminder in the wordpress admin section go away.

since the 2nd of july i have collected 26 dated folders, with anywhere from one to ten recordings, each, of me calling so-called “helpdesk” numbers — mostly claiming to come from micro$oft (naturally), norton (naturally), paypal (naturally), apple, amazon, fedex, or geek-squad — and saying “i wonder if you can tell me what it feels like to steal money from people?” probably 90% to 95% of the people on the other end have indian accents, but they give suspiciously american sounding names like “max” or “mike” or “jason” or “mary” or “sarah”, and about half of them are OBVIOUSLY in a “call center”, somewhere, where i can hear a whole bunch of other people getting scammed in a whole bunch of other languages. about a third of them respond by saying that they’re not stealing money from people, trying to convince me that they are, actually, representatives of a legitimate business, another third of them just hang up with no further comment, and the final third of them say things like “oh my god”, or “shut the fuck up, motherfucker”, or “i’ll fuck your wife”, or “suck your dad’s cock”, or “oldie, black, nigger from nigeria, hanging ass” or other such racist and seemingly offensive things — — which a REAL representative of a REAL legitimate company would lose their job INSTANTANEOUSLY for uttering over the telephone to a customer (and, honestly, i could care less what any of them say, because THEY ARE SCAMMERS, which is worse 😒)… but every now and then, i’ll ask the question and their response will be “fantastic” or “wonderful”, which makes me wonder what kind of interview actually passes these people.

moe went to chicago yesterday, and returns tomorrow, meaning that i have to take care of the dogs and the birds, as well as my usual nursery, laundry, and groceries for three days.

i replaced the GFI outlet under the deck with a non-GFI model, and, so far, the shed has NOT blown any circuits, whereas, before i replaced it, i had to reset the circuit no less than three times in five days. whether this is a good thing or not remains to be seen, but if it is, it has saved me a bunch of money in the short term, and if it isn’t, then the shed is far enough away from our house that any resulting fire probably won’t harm anything of importance.

cannabis, homegrown

the end

i harvested the last four plants, broke apart the root balls, added them to the compost pile, and took down the canopy this afternoon. i had to make space for the plants in the garage, because the shed/nursery is already full of five harvested plants, two flowering plants, and two clones.

next time i’m going to try putting the clones in a covered space and spraying them, because that’s recommended, and i haven’t been doing it… which is probably why i only have two existing clones out of the four that i started. 😒 but, really, that’s okay, because i don’t really NEED more than two plants, anyway. 😉

cannabis, homegrown, house stuff, nursery

back yard post

i finished manicuring the remaining outdoor plants. they still have a week or so to go before they get the chop, but now, all the remaining juice goes into the buds, and nothing else. i have two plants that have been hanging for a week, three that have been hanging for five days, and four that haven’t yet been harvested, plus two plants under flowering lights in the nursery — which, if everything goes the way it’s looking now, will produce more finished bud than my four outdoor plants! 👍👍 — and two or three clones in the light booth: two for sure, and one that still hasn’t decided whether or not it’s going to take.

and, it turns out that there is very likely a much less complicated and more immediate solution to the shed re-wiring problem! i still want to re-wire the shed, but it turns out that i really DON’T NEED a GFI outlet where the shed gets plugged into the house, AND GFI outlets get “tricky” with age. because of the fact that i KNOW the previous owner was a cheap-ass motherfucker, there’s no telling where the original GFI outlet came from… which means that, armed with a screwdriver and a replacement outlet, I can switch off the circuit that contains that damn GFI outlet, switch out the outlet with a new, non-GFI outlet, and PROBABLY solve my immediate problem.